Way back when I did my series of 20 Blog Tips in 20 Days – one of the tips was simply to read more. For the cliff notes – if you want to write better – read more.
But…
Read more of what?
That’s the question, isn’t it?
For one part of the question, write (and read) more of what you are passionate about. If you have no passion in what you are writing, it comes thru loud and clear.
I’ve always suggested using a feedreader. I love my Feed.ly! It has everything I put into it. Everything goes neatly into the folders I’ve setup.
But there’s a problem. It only contains the sites you put into it.
Guess what? There’s a world of interesting content out there that you don’t know about. Wouldn’t it be cool to find that too? I thought so too. You could do an endless Google Search – or you could have technology send it to you directly.
Here’s three ways how to do that.
1. Feedly has a search function. Just type a topic in and it’ll find some sites you didn’t know about. It also has a related sites function. Subscribe to the Mashable feed and it might suggest TechCrunch. It’s pretty good at that as long as the whole site is ‘on topic’. But that means you might miss a critical piece of great stuff that isn’t on a site consistent with that topic.
2. Medium. Medium tries to understand what I might like by what I have read in the past. Read a lot of posts about Bieber and it finds even more for me. Weee! The problem with Medium is that it only delivers content from Medium.
3. Prismatic. With Prismatic I set up a few topics and it searches the interwebs for exactly what I like. This means that for a blog that primarily writes about Burritos, has a great article about Mountain Biking – it might show up in my Prismatic page. It won’t in Feedly and it won’t in Medium.
That’s pretty cool. Sometimes I find articles that are spot on, sometimes they are a bit off. If I like the overall theme of the site I might add them to my Feed.ly.
Based in San Francisco, Prismatic was founded by Bradford Cross, Aria Haghighi. Personally I don’t think they get the respect they deserve. go start using http://getprismatic.com/ and start reading more of what interests you!
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and now,a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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